Over the past several years the use of cellular telephones has greatly increased in this country. As the number of users has increased, so has the number of cellular telephone systems around the country. This expansion of both users and systems has created the situation where a user of a cellular telephone from one system enters another system and uses the cellular telephone. An individual who uses a cellular telephone in this manner is known as a roamer.
With the increased use of cellular telephones and the consequential increase of roamers, a problem has arisen known as "roamer fraud". This type of fraud occurs when a roamer makes a long-distance telephone call from another cellular network system for which he has no intention of paying. At the present time under these circumstances, the cellular system from which the call is made cannot check to see if the caller has a valid account until after the call since the caller's account is with another system. With local system callers, the account may be validated before the call is made since the local caller has account information already on file with the cellular network system. Roamer fraud is estimated to be costing cellular network systems throughout the country millions of dollars a year.
Some cellular network systems have begun to attack the problem of roamer fraud by limiting roamer customers to certain types of calls within their systems. Another procedure that has been adopted to recover some of the roamer fraud losses is to charge higher rates for calls made by roamers. Both of these procedures are inconvenient to the customer and do not completely address the problem of roamer fraud.
Thus, a need has arisen for a system which will be more convenient for new roamer callers while at the same time protecting cellular network systems from the losses incurred by roamer fraud.